HostTools

Double bookings, guest lock outs, terrible support. Do not use this software. Host tools used to be great, but their support has been very bad lately. I’ve had to deal with continuous disconnects from VRBO, Guest door codes being cancelled before their reservations are over, and double bookings even though all platforms are correctly configured. Take your business elsewhere as there are many more channel manager softwares currently on the market.

This company offers an excellent product that does a great job of managing your short term rentals’ calendars to prevent double bookings. When things were not clear or working perfectly, support was an email away and I was never kept waiting more than one business day for a reply and then even faster in the back and forth support process (I am on the other side of the world too so most of the wait was through the night). That is worth gold to me in today’s usual terrible customer support contact systems. Highly recommended.

It’s cut down on my work responding to messages and helps me check in with guests during their stay automatically. The message automation is the best. It shows you a time line of the messages that will be sent and allows you to edit a message before it’s sent. I wasn’t sure how to use the automatic feedback tool. It didn’t seem possible to leave less than 5 stars.

As I have some properties to manage on Airbnb, message automation was crucial to provide me a way to do a better job in hosting, whether sending messages for the guest, to the cleaning staff or for myself. One of my favorite messages is to remember guest to do a review, that is only sent if the guest did not do a review :)

Amount of time spent manually responding to potential or actual guest enquiries, automates a lot of the capabilities that I would previously have had to do manually. Better automation features than that provided by AirBnB. Scheduled messaging, automated email capability, flexible pricing options. Cost per month is a no-brainer given the amount of time it saves you. Mostly difficulty in getting certain things to work - automated emails sent by Host Tools getting blocked as spam by ISPs is an ongoing unresolved problem. The flexibility around the pricing options is excellent, but it is not the most intuitive set-up, and therefore a detailed ‘user guide’ would be of great benefit.

I love this app - Host Tools as it was my primary app that allowed me to automate my whole business. It would increase/decrease the price as I needed and/or set it up like so. I have 0 complaints about the app itself. Once you learn how to set up pricing and its not too hard you just sit back and watch your airbnb fill up. The way my system was set up - I was never home to greet the guests unless I really needed to or they wanted to see me. I found that most of the time the guests don’t want to see the host anyway and so this application was a life-saver. Combined with Instant-Book - it worked out perfectly and allowed me to bypass the Airbnb Algorithm. I wholeheartedly recommend this tool for anyone hosting with Airbnb - especially if you have multiple listings. 12/10 from me.